4
The town had many distinctions, not the least of which was its gallows. Made of fine oak, it was stout, sturdy, and as fine as anything in this vale of tears. It stood right next to the two-story stone court house, a statement to all of mankind that this was a town not afraid of quick and absolute justice. There was even talk of adding a second rope so that when—as was the case with the Harper brothers—there were two miscreants, they could be executed at the exact same time.
Now a sign stood in front of the gallows:
HANGING
5:30 P.M.
DANCE TO FOLLOW
A local sketch artist stood in front of the gallows now, penciling out a rather inept depiction of the hanging mechanism. He was a butcher by day but drew for pleasure—his own.
A hanging. Everybody was going to have a danged good time.
Maya fixed Fargo a place in the barn loft. “I’m not sure what my brother’ll do if he finds you here. So be real quiet.”
She’d brought him a couple of blankets and laid them out on the hay. And also some slices of dried beef, bread, and some beer.
“You need more rest.”
“I need to find out what happened last night. And who I am.”
“Rest, first. You’re still pretty wobbly when you walk. And then tomorrow I’ll find out who you are.”
He smiled. “I know you can handle yourself and all but just how do you plan to do that?”
“I’ll go into town the way I usually do and all I’ll hear about is that dead girl they found under the bed in the hotel. And then I’ll hear all about the man the law is looking for. And that’ll be you. I’ll pick up as much information as I can. And by tomorrow afternoon, you’ll be fit enough to start figuring things out.”
“You could get in trouble.”
“For what? Asking questions? People think I’m helpless. And so they trust me. I think they think I’m pretty dumb. They wouldn’t think I could be helping out the man everybody’s looking for.”
“You’re taking a chance.”
“Believe it or not, I’m having fun.”
“You are?”
“Sure—back there by the lake—what we did. That was fun. And this is fun. It’s like solving a mystery in a book. There’s this woman in town, she used to read to me, especially mysteries. And that’s what this is.”
“There’s one difference.”
“What’s that?”
“That stories in books can’t hurt you. But this is life and that’s very different.” He paused. He had to say it, had to hear himself admit the possibility. Because it was a possibility. “What if it turns out that I’m the killer?”
“You’re not the killer.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can tell about people.”
“You’re never wrong?”
“Well, sometimes, I guess.”
“What if you’re wrong about me? What if it turns out you’ve been helping a killer all along? If I’m the man who killed that woman I saw under the bed—I don’t think I’d want to live, anyway, something like that on my mind.”
Neither spoke for a time. He looked at the night in the open window slots. The brilliant indifferent stars and the lazy quarter-moon made for a melancholy moment. The smell of hay still wet in places from the last rain—the sweet-sour tang of horse manure—the soft sawn smell of the new lumber on the sliding barn door downstairs. He allowed himself the luxury of having a moment’s peace. He didn’t give a damn about any of it for that moment. There was just this very pretty blind girl and the summoning of his soft hay mattress and her hint that everything would be all right. . . .
Without quite knowing what he was doing, he lay back, as if pressed in that direction by a giant, gentle, invisible hand . . . and gave into his sudden exhaustion . . . and the sudden stabbing headache that told him he was still suffering from what Maya had called a concussion. . . .
And then he slept . . .
“You recognize this, mister?”
At first he couldn’t make out much of the man standing over him with the rifle pointed at his face.
“Yep. I sure do.”
“My sister bring you here?”
“No. I just saw your barn and—”
The man didn’t use his rifle. He used his foot. He brought it up fast. It didn’t connect square on the jaw as he’d apparently planned but it caught plenty hard on the side. Enough to send shock after echoing shock of pain up the side of Fargo’s face.
“Now you tell me the truth, you sumbitch.”
“Tal! Tal! No!”
Maya’s voice coming from the far side of the barn. In his mind Fargo pictured her making her way through the darkness. That sure wouldn’t help her blindness any.
Tal made the mistake of turning. Maybe it wouldn’t have been a mistake with somebody slower and less angry and frustrated than Fargo. But it sure was a mistake with him.
Tal was in just the right position so that Fargo’s kick would catch him where any man is most vulnerable. He screamed when Fargo’s boot tip connected with its target. His rifle fired. He would have blown Fargo’s head apart if Fargo hadn’t already flung himself to his feet—forgetting his pain—and smashed four quick fists into Tal’s face.
Tal swung a looping right hand that not only missed Fargo but left him off balance. His arms started waving helplessly as he lost his footing on the edge of the loft. Then his rifle went flying through the air, landing on the dirt floor below, and firing uselessly into the gloom.
Tal followed his rifle. No amount of screaming, cursing, wailing, or flailing could save him from falling off the loft edge—especially when Fargo, out to defend himself at all cost—gave him a slight shove.
Fortunately, the fall wasn’t enough to do any permanent damage, though it probably didn’t do much for Tal’s own inner savage. Any man who beat up his sister—especially his blind sister—probably thought of himself as a pretty tough hombre. Falling off a barn loft hopefully would knock him down a peg or two.
Fargo took the old-fashioned route. He climbed down the ladder. Maya was ministering to her brother.
“Oh, Tal, you always have to get so mad.”
“He’s the one they’re lookin’ for, Sis.”
“That who’s looking for?”
“The whole town. Including the sheriff.”
“What’s he supposed to’ve done?”
“There’s no s’posed to—”
And then Tal, who hadn’t yet regained his feet, told of how this here man, name of Skye Fargo, had been seen with blood all over him running from the fancy hotel room where the dead girl was. And how everybody was looking for him and that word was he was in town to help one of his buddies, a fella named Cates. He also described how the girl had been so badly beaten and mutilated.
“Then it couldn’t have been him, Tal.”
“Oh, no? Why not?”
“He wouldn’t do by a woman like that.”
Tal laughed. “Oh, yeah, he looks like a real gentle type, he does.”
“He sure is with women, Tal. That I can testify to.”
Tal started to struggle to his feet. Fargo put out a hand, helped him up.
Tal said, “I coulda broken my back.”
“That’s true. But you could’ve busted my head wide open. I didn’t have any choice.”
Tal sulked a moment and said, “Well, he ain’t stayin’ here. If Sheriff Burrell ever found out we were puttin’ him up—”
“One more day,” Maya said, “just till he starts getting his strength back.”
Fargo said, “I appreciate that, Maya. But I’ve got things I’ve got to do.” He turned to Tal. “You say I came here to help a friend of mine by the name of Cates?”
“That’s how I heard it, mister. Curt Cates. Only he’s already behind bars.”
“Where do I find his house?”
Tal told him where Serena Cates lived. “But you’d be crazy to leave here now. They’d spot you in a minute.”
“Not in the middle of the night, they wouldn’t.”
“You can’t go now, Skye,” Maya said. “You’re not strong enough.”
“I’m feeling a lot better after all the sleeping I did today and tonight.” He still felt dizzy but he’d be damned if he’d admit it to her. “I’d like to get going, in fact.”
“Oh, Skye—”
“Dammit, if he wants to go, Maya—”
“You just want to get rid of him, Tal!”
“I just don’t want to get crosswise with Burrell. I sure don’t want him as an enemy.”
Fargo went over to Maya and took her gently by the shoulders. “I’ll be fine. And Tal’s just being practical. There’s no reason for either of you to get into trouble over this. Why get dragged into it?”
“But if they see you they’ll shoot on sight.”
“There’s a reward,” Tal said. “Three thousand dollars. That’s more than most folks make in three years. She’s right about that, mister. They’ll shoot you on sight. That’s somethin’ you need to be careful of.”
Tal sounded as if he was giving his advice sincerely. You never could figure people. Here was a guy who beat up his blind sister. Here was a guy Fargo had pushed off a barn loft. And here was a guy telling him to avoid getting killed.
As if he’d been able to read Fargo’s mind, he said, “I don’t want nothin’ to happen to you ’cause if it does, that’s all Sis’ll talk about the rest of our lives. And she’ll blame me.”
“You’re darn right, I will, Tal.”
Tal went back up to the house. Fargo went down to the creek and washed in the cold, clean water. His big stallion needed to be saddled and fed. Maya insisted on taking care of those things for him while he ate bread and drank the coffee she’d fixed for him.
“I need to find out who the dead girl was,” Fargo said.
“Tal said she was a prostitute.”
“She was a rich one, staying in a fancy hotel like that.”
“I doubt she signed for the room.”
“Yeah, I doubt that, too. Somebody else did. That’s something else I need to find out.”
“How’ll you get around without people recognizing you?”
“I won’t be able to. Not for long. But Serena Cates can find things out for me.
“I’m scared for you, Skye.”
“I appreciate that. But I’m a lot more scared for Curt.”
Sheriff Henry Burrell got up and went out onto the front stoop of his three-room house and sat there smoking his pipe and looking up at the stars.
He was trying not to go into the woods.
He was trying not to think about the dead girl in the hotel room.
He was trying not to think about how he got sometimes when he drank too much.
The sounds of a lonely dog, an alert barn owl, and a night bird’s mating call kept him company.
The temperature had dropped well into the lower sixties. He sat shirtless in wrinkled work trousers and bare feet. The quarter-moon was so sharply etched it looked unreal, almost like a painting on a stage backdrop. He enjoyed this time of night, having learned to enjoy it after the death of his wife had left him empty and vaguely frightened in the middle of the night. For some reason, sitting on the stoop and taking in the scents and sights and sounds of a cool summer midnight brought him solace. As if the shadows eased not only his grief but his remorse.
If he could only go back and change things . . . Steffanie just fell face forward dead one evening at the supper table. All he could think of was all the times he had run around on her . . . nobody was in a better position to have free whores pushed at him than the town sheriff. The gals who ran those houses—and there were three of them in town here—wanted to keep the lawmen happy. And so they lent them their best gals for as long of an evening as they wanted them. But they’d soon learned about Henry and how he got when he was drunk. . . .
It wasn’t so bad when he bruised them if the bruises didn’t show. Sometimes he could control himself to the degree that he’d visit his fists and teeth only on their bodies. It was when he got rough with their faces that the madams got pissed. That, as one of them had angrily explained, was like walking into a general store and damaging the merchandise to the point that nobody wanted to buy it.
There weren’t a lot of men who wanted a whore with a black eye.
Steffanie had to suffer through all of it. And then their son Hap turning out the way he had—the sullen town bully who drank just as much and pounded women around just as much as the old man—she’d already seen Hap starting to do these things when he was a strapping youngster.
The night bird again. An almost chilling cry this time. Coming from the woods.
He decided he’d better go have a look.
Make sure they were still where he’d dug the hole and put them. Sometimes a raccoon could dig up the deepest hole a man could put in the ground.
He stood up. Thought a moment about going in to get his boots. Decided he was being a nancy boy about it and moved on. Hell, a few broken twigs against the bottoms of his feet—was he such a pampered sissy at this age that he couldn’t take a few gnarled twigs jagging him in the soles of his feet?
Hell no, he wasn’t.
He went to see if the bloody clothes from last night were still where he’d buried them.
A few lanterns gleamed in the windows of the town’s poorer houses on the edge of town. These people lived a life that combined town and country. They were well enough away from neighbors that they could keep a dairy cow or two plus chickens and a few pigs in their back yards without making anybody mad. They kept farmers’ hours, too, which meant that they had just risen now that first light appeared in pale streaks across the night sky.
Fargo ground-tied his stallion a quarter-mile from the Cates place. The law would naturally assume that he would try and contact Serena Cates for help. He’d apparently come here to help her and her husband.
That meant that the law would also have posted a man somewhere near the house, a man waiting patiently for Fargo to show up.
Fargo did a wide sweep of all sides of the log cabin where the Cates family lived. He didn’t find anything suspicious as he walked the south, east, and west points of the property. Then he heard the plop plop plop of acorns falling from a tree. A man was up there, moving around. He no doubt had a rifle and he no doubt intended to kill Fargo. But Fargo was too far away to fire on. The shooter had to hope that Fargo would do him the favor of moving closer.
Fargo turned and walked to the west, as if he was heading into town. The mud road was rutted from recent rains. The cool air smelled of flapjacks being made on a nearby stove. Horses, dogs, and kids would be coming awake soon.
A large oak ten feet off the road gave Fargo the hiding place he was looking for. He hurried behind it. Drew his Colt and waited.
The shooter was a tall man with a limp. He didn’t wear a hat so Fargo got a look at his face. The man looked sad. You didn’t expect a shooter to look sad. By rights, a shooter should look serene stalking his prey. The way hunters looked at peace. Probably the limp, Fargo decided. Anything that marks a man as different also marks him as an inferior. And inferiors are never quite accepted by people. They might feel sorry for the inferiors, they might even encourage and help the inferiors, but the inferiors always know that they aren’t looked on as being as whole and desirable as their smiling and patronizing benefactors. Hence, the man’s sad face.
Fargo was about to make that face even sadder.
He let the limping man get several feet past the oak tree before making his move. Then he ran fast at the man. The shooter heard him, turned to fire, but it was already too late. Fargo grabbed the barrel of the man’s rifle and ripped it from his hands.
Fargo tucked it under his arm. With his Colt, he beckoned for the shooter to start walking back toward the Cates cabin. The sad-faced man looked as if he wanted to say something. But he didn’t. The defeat that was on his face now spread throughout his body. The shoulders slumped, the arms dangled limp, and the head hung low. He wasn’t going to be any more trouble.
Fargo and the man went to the cabin door. Serena answered in a plain, loose dress that somehow lent her pretty, earnest face a kind of prairie nobility. Fargo asked for some rope. She stared a moment at the man next to Fargo and said, “That’s Bryce Willis.”
“He with the sheriff?”
“Sometimes. When the sheriff needs an extra hand. He goes to the same church I do. He’s a decent man, Skye.”
Fargo snorted. Learning his own name was a step in the right direction. “Unless he’s shooting people in the back.”
“I wouldn’t never backshoot nobody,” Willis said. “Not even a killer like you.”
Fargo smiled. “I have my doubts about that, Willis. About you not backshooting anybody. But I’m not going to give you the chance to prove it either way. Now, c’mon, I’ll tie you up.”
“He hasn’t had an easy life, Skye.” Her dark, compassionate eyes rested momentarily on Willis’s bad foot. “You know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry for his bad life, Serena. But that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have shot me in the back.”
“I don’t see how you can do much asking around now, Skye,” Serena Cates said, bringing him a cup of coffee.
“I don’t have any choice,” Fargo said.
“But how’ll you get around with everybody looking for you, Skye?”
“Won’t be easy but I’ll have to do it.”
“Didn’t anything come of the dead girl’s sister Barb Potter? I know she took over her father’s farm. You mentioned when you first got to town that you were going to see her but never got around to it.”
He hadn’t told her yet. He said, “I need you to tell me who I am.”
She started to smile then stopped herself. “Skye, what’re you talking about?”
He touched his head. “Somebody hit me pretty hard and my memory—certain things are still clear to me. But I don’t have any recollection of who I am.”
“Oh, my Lord, Skye. My Lord.”
She reached across the crude kitchen table—the wobbly kitchen table—and said, “I’ll help you all I can.”
It was just then that Tommy socked Davie and the cabin was filled with sudden tears and screams.
Being a lawman had taught him that getting rid of bloody clothing was never as easy as it seemed. Burrell had seen any number of killers caught by shirts and trousers that suddenly turned up. You could throw them in the river but a lot of times they’d surface again. You could burn them but sometimes enough of a shirt, say, would be left to tell you who the killer was. Or you could bury them. Burying seemed the most reliable to Burrell.
The bloody shirt and trousers he’d buried had been seen around town so often that nobody who lived hereabouts would have any trouble knowing who they belonged to.
He’d buried them off-trail, nearly three feet down, and covered the loose dirt with branches and leaves.
What he hadn’t counted on was how unsettling this was, having the garments so near the house. It was as if the clothes radiated an invisible signal that made it difficult to sleep or to think about anything else.
There they were, buried underground. And there he was eating supper or relaxing with his pipe or darning his socks for the next day—and the strange unseen, unheard vibration that the bloody clothes gave off clogged his mind.
He needed to know they were safe. Then maybe he could get an hour or two of sleep before the day began. He couldn’t go on this way much longer, he was sure of that.
Maybe if he moved the clothes—bury them further away from the house—
The earth of loam, the earth of sandy soil, the earth of tiny bones of animals from eons ago—so many secrets in its cold embrace.
The bloody clothes buried by Henry Burrell were just one more.
He stumbled through the undergrowth beneath the paling sky. And when he saw them, a gasp almost like a sob filled his throat.
Nothing—not forest creature nor man—had touched them. The branches and leaves that covered their grave were perfectly in place.
Safe—his dread and fear had been for nothing.
“I’ll be all right for a while and then it’ll hit me,” Fargo was saying. “That I don’t know who I am. That I have memories of some things but none of others.” He pressed his fingers against his temples. “And the damned headache. Sometimes that’s the worst part of all.”
“You need to see a doctor.”
“I see a doctor, he goes straight to the sheriff as soon as I leave.”
“You’re really sweating.”
“This fever. It comes and goes.”
“Why don’t you rest here for a while?”
He smiled grimly. “You’re forgetting I’ve got a duly sworn deputy sheriff tied up and gagged in your back-yard. They’ll come looking for him pretty soon. I’d hate to be sawing logs when they come. I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”
Now it was her turn for a grim smile. “Dragged me into it? Skye, they’re about to hang my husband. I’m already in it.”
“I’m sure I asked you this before,” Fargo said. “But if I did, I don’t remember. Does Curt have any enemies?”
“Oh, gosh, Skye. Curt? No.”
“Think about it, Serena. I don’t necessarily mean anybody who picked a fight with him or anything like that. But somebody who might have a reason to resent him.”
This time, she didn’t answer right away. “Well, Paul, I guess.”
“Paul?”
“Paul O’Brien.”
“He and Curt have some kind of run-in?”
“Not a run-in exactly. But—well, it was about me. I—well, I went out with Paul a few times. Paul is a very nice man. But he’s got this terrible temper. He thought I’d marry him.”
“Terrible temper enough to kill a girl and make it look like Curt did it?”
“I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. I told Sheriff Burrell about him, of course. But I don’t think he even approached Paul about anything.”
“Where’s this O’Brien live?”
She told him.
“If he was the killer, then he wouldn’t have been happy about me showing up and looking into things.”
“No, he wouldn’t have.”
“Maybe I forced his hand.”
“How so?”
“Maybe I forced him to kill that girl in the hotel room and then set me up for it.”
“But that’s so cold-blooded—” She shook her head. Then stopped. Fargo could see that she’d remembered something. “He loosened a wheel on our wagon one night.”
“When was this?”
“A year ago or so. One of the boys recognized him running away from the shed where we store things. We couldn’t figure out what he would’ve been doing. We didn’t check the wagon. We went to a dance that night—practically everyone in town had gone—and halfway there, the wheel came loose. It was one of the few times I’d ever seen Curt so mad he actually confronted somebody. Paul denied having anything to do with the wheel. Curt called him a liar. Paul started to swing at Curt but a couple of the older men stepped in and stopped the fight before it really got started.”
“Was that the last run-in you had with O’Brien?”
“Well, our shed mysteriously caught fire one night.”
“Any proof it was O’Brien?”
“No proof. But a strong suspicion.”
Fargo finished up his coffee. “He ever make any advances to you?”
“A few times. I never told Curt about them. I didn’t want him to have any more run-ins. Paul’s a lot bigger than Curt and a lot angrier. Sometimes, he acts almost crazy, in fact, when he doesn’t get his own way, times like that.”
“Then I’m definitely going to pay him a little courtesy visit.”
“You’ll have your hands full.”
He looked down at the directions he’d scrawled out on a piece of paper with a lead pencil. Despite his memory loss and his slamming headache, he had a lot of work ahead of him. He said, “I just realized something.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m gonna be damned interested in hearing why I supposedly killed that woman in the hotel room.” A flash of anger. “My sense of things is that I never saw her before I woke up on the floor in the room. But my memory—I can’t know that for sure.”
She touched her work-worn hand to his. “Oh, Skye, I wish there was something I could do—some way I could help you.”
“You’ve helped me plenty already. These two names sound like good leads.” He stood up. He still wasn’t the old Skye Fargo. The old Skye Fargo’s knees didn’t tremble when he stood up. He hit his head with the tips of his fingers. Angry. Like hitting a machine that wouldn’t work right. Very angry, in fact.